Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld

By Patrick Harpur

Book Overview

Daimonic Reality is a sweeping look at strange, otherworldly events in the world around us -- UFOs, fairies, phantom animals, visions of the Virgin Mary, alien abductions, and mysterious lights in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0937663611
• ISBN13: 9780937663615
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Pine Winds Press
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The World Soul Gains a Modern Voice

This is a book that urgently needed to be written, an intelligent and genuinely thoughtful examination of anomalous phenomena like "UFO" and "fairy" sightings. I've spent time in rural India where these types of experiences are still amazingly common. In India the World Soul or anima mundi is called the mahat ("great mind") and is understood as the source of many extra-ordinary phenomena. On the one hand they are recognized as hallucinations (maya); on the other, they reflect the incursion of the tanmatras (subtle matter) into our physical experience, and in that sense are completely real. I'm grateful to Harpur for reintroducing the World Soul to jaded Western readers who may have lost sight of the mysterious "Other World" which co-exists with our modern rational universe in such an uneasy manner. He's onto something important here. This book is a classic; I'm certain people will still be reading it a century from now.

For dedicated students of religion, mythology, & metaphysics

Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide To The Otherworld by Patrick Harpur offers a uniquely holistic and metaphysical perspective concerning otherworldly events such as UFOs, fairies, phantom animals, visions of the Virgin Mary, alien abductions, and more. Presenting the theory of Daimonic Reality, which perceives certain creatures and things to be not literally real (incapable of being unequivocally proven to exist) but rather Daemonically real (always being expressed in one form or another no matter how heavily skeptical opinions proclaim otherwise), Daimonic Reality is a thoughtful and fascinatingly unique look at the realm of the bizarre. Daimonic Reality is a "must read" title for dedicated students of religion, mythology, metaphysics, and paranormal studies.

A book of the Anima Mundi

This is a book of the Anima Mundi, the living soul of the world. It is this soul (like Jung's collective unconscious) that serves as a great reservoir of primordial images. Prior to the age of rigid religious dogma, and equally rigid scientific materialism, human beings naturally seemed to tap into this living soul that permeates and unites all. Indeed, people actively sought to tap into this "otherworld" to gain guidance and gifts for themselves and the community. Now, even though modern man no longer believes in such things, this "otherworld" is as potent as it ever was. Perhaps it is more so, for if people ignore and repress this alternate reality, it seems to "break out" into the "real" world with even more insistence. Harpur speculates that such unexplained phenomena as fairies, UFO's, angels, Yetis, crop circles, lake monsters, etc., all represent such breakthroughs by the otherworld. This is indeed an important and ground breaking book, not because it contains anything truly new, but because it reemphasises something quite old- perhaps older than the species itself, perhaps the fount from which we came.... Above all, just because modern men are through with the otherworld does not mean that It is through with us. Not at all.

Get it back in print!

One of the best books on anomalous events I have ever read. To often in reporting things such as bigfoot, UFOs, or the like, the event is merely ridiculed as a hoax or delusion or fit into an acceptable point of view, whether that viewpoint is scientific, theological or some form of common sense. Investigators of bigfoot usually try to explain it as some form of giant primate. In the Himalayas or the remote forests of the northwest that might be believable. But in Oklahoma? Ufologists usually try to stress how consistent the reports from around the world are, claiming that this shows that a single reality, a "real" reality, is behind them. They are anything but consistent. UFO encounters are weird. They don't fit a pattern, at least not that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. Patrick Harpur does not "explain" these events, but he does shed a great deal of light on them. I highly recommend his book if you are lucky enough to get a hold of a copy.

It doesn't get better than this.

This is truly one of the best books ever written on what might actually be going on with UFOs, fairies, and anomolous events of all kinds. Patrick Harpur has written a profound study of a reality most of us have never imagined, and perhaps would prefer to ignore. With vast erudition, cutting intelligence, and great good humor, he explores all the possibilities--scientific, psychological, philosophical--of what that world of Daimonic Reality might be, and how it interrupts our narrow, earthbound sensibilities. And then, in a burst of glory, he frees the reader from the very need to find "rational explanations" for daimonic events. I reread this book regularly and often, and I urge anyone open-minded enough to wonder about the nature of our world to pick it up immediately.